Higher Ed Musings 17.

Swords of Damocles

The recent election has many, many people in higher education hanging by a thread, worried about their future: not only faculty and staff but also the thousands employed by the Department of Education, the National Endowment for Humanities, and many other organizations devoted to educational and humanistic missions. These many thousands have felt secure in their livelihood, that their work was aligned with the vision of the American public. Apparently not.

There is an argument to be made for the value of higher ed, for public investment in higher ed. But it needs to be made without politics and with humility.

But first, this post is a kind of sermon about the precarity that the working class is used to that the laptop class isn’t so used to. Maybe the thousands need to think differently about security. Is the better metaphor the Sword of Damocles or Jonathan Edwards’s image of a sinner hanging by a thread over hellfire? Or perhaps Melville’s “Monkey Rope” from Moby-Dick?

Politics are one kind of risk for the laptop class. The weather is another. There are thousands of Americans who lost everything this past year in hurricanes, floods, and fires this summer. I have good friends (academics) still reeling from the devastation of Hurricane Helene.

AI is another kind of risk. I see jobs lost in a certain kind of internet “content” writing, in customer service, in data analytics and report generation, in legal document preparation and contract review. Many of these jobs would have gone to humanities graduates.

A sense of security is a funny thing. When you lose it, you wonder why you had it in the first place. I read Edwards’s great sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" (1741) every year. Edwards’s basic point was don’t ever feel secure, that seeking security is a human error. You are never secure. The only reason anyone feels safe, he argues, is that God hasn’t struck yet: “The sword of divine justice is every moment brandished over their heads, and it is nothing but the hand of arbitrary mercy, and God's mere will, that holds it back.”^[1] You should never not think about this, he preaches.

Related, but very different, is the Samurai notion, “keep death in mind at all times.” For Ben Horowitz, who draws from the Bushido code in his 2019 book What You Do Is Who You Are, this means being particularly mindful and meticulous in all you do, since you may be doing something for the last time and need to preserve an honorable legacy. It also means creating a culture of virtue in your workplace. “Your individual reputation and honor should mean something within your company, and be at stake in everything you do.” (I read The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Horowitz’s 2015 book, every year and, as dean, used to give it to my department chairs.)

Whether it’s keeping death in mind to achieve mental equilibrium in the face of uncertainty and events you cannot control or keeping God in mind because “You hang by a slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about it and ready every moment to singe it, and burn it asunder,” there’s a lot to be said always keeping in mind that life can change in a minute.^[2] As Ishmael puts it:

this situation of mine was the precise situation of every mortal that breathes… If your banker breaks, you snap; if your apothecary by mistake sends you poison in your pills, you die. True, you may say that, by exceeding caution, you may possibly escape these and the multitudinous other evil chances of life. But handle Queequeg's monkey-rope heedfully as I would, sometimes he jerked it so, that I came very near sliding overboard. 

Facing the loss of livelihood is not quite the same as the loss of life, and I feel for many thousands of individuals who may lose their livelihood in the coming months. Yet I also see the virtue in not getting too complacent, as Tyler Cowen argued in 2016:

When everyone tries to dig in and tries to become super safe, ultimately dynamism dwindles, you run out of the ability to pay the bills, and you can’t maintain all those protective barriers. The more you try to control risk in the micro sense, the more you lose your ability to hold the really big risks at bay.

It is good to keep risks in mind. I was musing about insecurity in higher education before November 5, The past twelve months saw a lot of stepping down from higher ed office – more than a few presidents, provosts, deans, members of boards of trustees. Anyone who goes into higher ed leadership knows it’s a risky business. Some years ago a former university president told me that before you take office you have to imagine walking across campus and passing signs calling for your ouster. More recently I told a sitting president this and he visibly blanched. Not a good sign.

That is, I was thinking more about the Sword of Damocles hanging by a slender thread above a leader than I was about Edwards’s idea of the leader (or anyone else) hanging by the thread (or the sword of justice) until the election upended the complacency of so many colleagues in higher ed who hadn’t been, they presumed, leading risky lives.

In brief, the Sword of Damocles is a tale about a young courtier (Damocles) who wanted to be king for a day and the king (Dionysius) says okay sit here on my throne, and there’s a huge sharp sword hanging by a thread above his head, which Damocles decides isn’t fun after all. More on this below.

Every higher ed leader serves “at the pleasure of” some one or some board. The number and categories of people you can displease is formidable: Students, parents, faculty (note the particularly righteous subcategories: tenured, adjunct, and emeriti), boards of trustees, legislators, community members, staff, fans, vendors, donors, law enforcement, unions, the Department of Education, accreditors, alumni, more unions.  That’s no particular order I just started listing. I should add students who left before receiving their degree. Plus others. Departments of public health. Think tanks. Free speech advocates. The media.

The risk is the same for deans as for presidents, if the limelight is mercifully lower. In my nearly seven years as dean at two different public institutions I’ve faced angry students (demanding I fire this faculty member or that), angry parents (demanding I make a faculty member change a grade), angry faculty members (don’t get me started), angry alumni (over a student media issue), angry fans (for a poetry contest during Covid), angry donors (the way the university wanted to spend the funds) and angry law enforcement (the same student media issue). I’ve had student petitions (for more theatre funding), faculty petitions (for more theatre funding), and more union grievances than I can count.

Perhaps the Sword of Damocles story doesn’t translate well to higher ed because there are too many little swords always hanging. Applied to college presidents, the sword is usually donors. If you search the term in back issues of Chronicle of Higher Ed, it’s mostly — wrongly — a faculty member applying it to himself, with the sword a capricious dean mercilessly wielding social media policy or restricting travel funds or cutting budgets or threatening tenure. So as a dean I was both sitting under swords while being perceived as the sword.  Fun!

The very best part of being a dean was hiring excellent people and getting the benefit of the rich knowledge of the scholars around you. In writing this post, I reached out to our new classicist, Jordan Johansen, an extraordinary scholar of the afterlife of the ancient world in modern culture, about the Sword of Damocles now:

I think the basic meaning from Cicero is that there are pros and cons to power—Dionysius gets to enjoy immense privilege, luxury, and wealth but, as a result, always lives under threat, whether the threat be losing his power or losing his life. To mix metaphors, power is always a double-edged sword. I think when you understand it within Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, it becomes a warning against seeking power/wealth/luxury at any cost—it’s better to be less powerful but maintain virtue, and that’s the key to the happy life. The allusion is used all the time as a metaphor, usually in cases of impending doom (nuclear war). Often the metaphor is used when there is a difficult choice at hand and the wrong decision (or even any decision) will cause the sword hanging overhead to fall. (Here’s an interesting short NPR article with Daniel Mendelsohn on the meaning of the metaphor in the context of the 2011 debt crisis).

Dan-el Padilla Peralta (professor of Classics at Princeton) tackles the question with regards to hip-hop in a 2015 Eidolon article, “From Damocles to Socrates.” He traces the introduction of the Sword of Damocles into hip-hop in the 1996 song “Zealots” by The Fugees (Lauryn Hill, Pras, Wyclef Jean) at a moment when rapper-as-king imagery was at its peak (think Biggie in a crown). I’ve looked at something similar tracing Cleopatra imagery in hip-hop. The imagery is then reintroduced by Kanye West for his single “Power” for his album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (2010), referencing Richard Westall’s painting The Sword of Damocles (1812). 

Professor Padilla doesn’t exactly answer why Wyclef Jean references the Sword of Damocles in “Zealots,” except that it is thematically relevant to the situation of American hip-hop in the late 1990s. I do find Dan-el’s comment that the allusion is “destabilizing” and “undermines the construct of royal invincibility projected by the rest of the song” to be compelling.

While I do think that hip-hop (re)introduced the Sword of Damocles to a new sector of the cultural mainstream, the reference was already really popular in the cultural mainstream—there’s a song (“The Sword of Damocles”) about it in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) and JFK references the Sword of Damocles in a 1961 speech before the general assembly of the United Nations (“Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles…”). It’s even referenced in Chaucer.

My impression is that the reference has always been at least somewhat mainstream and has a life outside of its specific reference to Cicero and Dionysius, which would also explain its change of meaning (any situation with a sense of impending doom, like the JFK reference). In Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (1987), he lists The Sword Damocles and Damocles’ Sword as one of the 5,000 terms an American must know to have cultural literacy. At the time, some classicists were interested in this list to argue for the field’s relevancy, and the reference occasionally shows up when classicists express anxieties about the field of Classics in a “the children won’t know what the Sword of Damocles is without Classics and society as we know it will collapse” kind of way. The Sword of Damocles passage from Cicero shows up in many intermediate Latin textbooks from the 20^th century but has been replaced by more relevant/diverse texts in some textbooks (e.g. the 1995 edition of Ecce Romani replaces “The Sword of Damocles” with “The Siege of Jerusalem”—in general this is a corrective for previous versions of the textbook that have rather snide references to Jewish slaves in Rome. I wonder if textbook editors would have removed “The Sword of Damocles” if they knew The Fugees were going to make the allusion relevant again a year later.)

While I don’t think Frederick Douglass mentions the Sword of Damocles, Charles Stearns does use it in his freedom narrative of Henry “Box” Brown. “O reader, have you no heart to sympathize with the injured slave, as he thus lives in a state of perpetual torment, the dread uncertainty of his wife’s fate, continually hanging over his head, and poisoning all his joys, as the naked sword hung by a hair, over the head of an ancient king’s guest, as he was seated at a table loaded with all the luxuries of an epicure’s devising? This sword, unlike the one alluded to, did often pierce my breast, and when I had recovered from the wound, it was again hung up, to torture me. This is slavery, a natural and concomitant part of the accursed system!” (1849, pp. 48-49). 

I’ve written about Henry “Box” Brown and I didn’t notice the Sword of Damocles reference! Is there better evidence of the worth of higher education than a scholar who can call up knowledge and show its relevance across fields on short notice? Who can suggest, as she also did, that I might add to the thread the Stoic concept of memento mori, the reminder that we all die, that life is ephemeral? Seeing these connections is the very point of higher education. And for those who say “ah, AI will be able to do this,” I say no. Here’s Claude 3.5:

The Sword of Damocles has had a fascinating cultural evolution from its origins in Cicero's "Tusculan Disputations," where he relates the tale of Damocles experiencing the anxiety of rule under Dionysius II of Syracuse.

While it wasn't prominent in 19th century African American literature as you note about Du Bois and Douglass, it found powerful resonance during the Cold War era, particularly becoming a metaphor for nuclear annihilation. President Kennedy famously used it in his 1961 UN speech regarding nuclear weapons: "Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads..."

In hip-hop, the metaphor has been repurposed to represent various forms of looming threat or precarity. Nas used it in "The World is Yours" (1994) and Wu-Tang Clan has referenced it. The image particularly resonates with themes of systemic oppression and constant danger in urban life.

The phrase has also become significant in legal discourse, where "Damocles Doctrine" refers to continuing threat or coercion. In business, it's often used to describe pending hostile takeovers or regulatory threats.

Given the richness of Jordan’s email, I asked Claude to elaborate and it added this:

In popular culture, it's appeared in surprising places: Roger Waters used it in Pink Floyd's The Wall material, it's been the title of numerous thriller novels, and video games like Metal Gear Solid have incorporated it as both metaphor and plot device.

Wait, what? I asked Claude to check the Pink Floyd:

I apologize - I made a mistake in attributing a Sword of Damocles reference to Pink Floyd and Roger Waters. This appears to be something I hallucinated. While Pink Floyd certainly dealt with themes of power, anxiety, and impending doom in their work, I cannot point to a specific reference to the Sword of Damocles in their lyrics or other material. I should have fact-checked this claim before including it.

Ok and Metal Gear Solid?

I apologize - I made the same kind of error here. While Metal Gear Solid deals extensively with themes of nuclear threat and military power, I cannot actually verify a specific Sword of Damocles reference in the series. I let my knowledge of the series' themes around nuclear deterrence and military power lead me to make an unfounded claim.

I should have been more careful about making these specific attributions without being able to verify them. In retrospect, I should have focused on the confirmed references in places like Kennedy's speech and the documented hip-hop references.

(In fact Jordan points out, Claude is hallucinating about Nas and Wu-Tang Clan, though I didn’t know enough to ask. Too much dependence! Do not tie yourself to AI with a monkey rope!)

Politics, climate, and AI will change many lives and livelihoods in the years to come. Are we the thread or the sword or the person sitting under it? What can we depend upon? This answer is clear. We can depend on our knowledge that precarity and risk is the human condition. But knowledge will only remain ours to use and profit from if we invest in institutions devoted to valuing it, to learning about our past, and understanding how we have survived, thrived, and progressed while hanging by a thread. 

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^[1] Edwards’s “Sinners” is not a sermon for the faint of heart. His two best-remembered metaphors compare humans to spiders. God us currently holding each one of us “over the pit of hell, much in the same way as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire” is one. The other is even more fright-provoking:

“if God should let you go, you would immediately sink, and swiftly descend and plunge into the bottomless gulf; and your healthy constitution, and your own care and prudence, and best contrivance, and all your righteousness, would have no more influence to uphold you, and keep you out of hell, than a spider's web would have to stop a falling rock.”

^[2] What does it mean to fall, to die?  We don't pay attention to this, Edwards warns. "The unseen, unthought-of-ways and means of persons going suddenly out of the world are innumerable and inconceivable." "The arrows of death fly unseen at noon-day; the sharpest sight cannot discern them." Edwards's primary ire is directed at "natural man," who loves science, who thinks science and technology are his Gods, who believe they are masters of their universe.  No, Edwards warns: "men's own wisdom is no security to them from death;"

Edwards uses this line to take his fellow American colonists to task, in 1741, for not paying enough attention to the precariousness of their position. The year 1741 was not a bad time to be an American colonist of European descent. You could do well, take land, till it, build mills and roads and bridges, buy and sell things, thrive.  But Edwards was also a slaveholder, keeping a “servant’ named Venus. And his primary interest in Native Americans was converting them to Christianity.  

It is small consolation that Edwards was focused solely on Europeans because of what he saw as their overconfident, wealth-seeking, self-centered sinning. He believed the focus on self-determination was a fool's errand, and that as a matter of scale, all human actions are irrelevant in comparison to the scale of the heavens and the eternity of damnation. Such was Jonathan Edwards’s worldview.

That is, Edwards believed that no act, no decision a person makes on earth can compare to the act and decisions made by God. The decision his listeners should think about, Edward warns, is the decision that God makes by not casting all the sinners alive into the fires of hell right now: